‘Dear God, I am not a son of a bitch’: Justifications for patriarchal violence and the mischaracterization of Stephen King’s Jack Torrance

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy A. Stephens

Stephen King has criticized Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining for its characterization of Jack Torrance as an unsympathetic monster rather than a well-intentioned man tragically destroyed by his addiction and anger. However, a re-examination of the novel and its sequel shows that King’s Jack Torrance is, no matter what King says, a dangerous patriarchal figure long before he enters the Overlook. The Shining and Doctor Sleep detail Jack’s wife and son’s co-dependent attachment to him, their wariness and fear of him, his long history of toxic behaviour and his deep capacity for self-deception that all help to expose a justifying narrative for patriarchal violence. However, King’s extratextual defences of Jack and the critical narrative that reaffirms his assessment of Jack’s moral character must be part of our analysis of The Shining’s critique of patriarchal ideology, as the contrast between those statements and the textual evidence reveal a desire to see Jack as sympathetic that makes King and the audience complicit in the same narrative of justification that the novel exposes.

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Gutiérrez-Rodríguez ◽  
Elena G. Gonzalez ◽  
Íñigo Martínez-Solano

Twelve novel polymorphic microsatellite loci were isolated and characterized for the Iberian ribbed newt, Pleurodeles waltl (Caudata, Salamandridae). The distribution of this newt ranges from central and southern Iberia to northwestern Morocco. Polymorphism of these novel loci was tested in 40 individuals from two Iberian populations and compared with previously published markers. The number of alleles per locus ranged from two to eight. Observed and expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.13 to 0.57 and from 0.21 to 0.64, respectively. Cross-species amplification was tested in Pleurodeles nebulosus, which is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN. Eight new and seven previously published loci amplified successfully in that species and thus represent a valuable conservation tool. The novel microsatellites will be useful for a better understanding of the population dynamics, demography, genetic structure, and evolutionary history of Pleurodeles waltl and P. nebulosus.


2013 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 570-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao-Ting Xiao ◽  
Luis G. Giménez-Lirola ◽  
Priscilla F. Gerber ◽  
Yong-Hou Jiang ◽  
Patrick G. Halbur ◽  
...  

Many astrovirus (AstV) species are associated with enteric disease, although extraintestinal manifestations in mammalian and avian hosts have also been described. In this study, the prevalence rates of porcine AstV types 1–5 (PAstV1–PAstV5) were investigated using faecal samples from 509 pigs of which 488 (95.9 %) came from farms with a history of diarrhoea. All of the five known PAstV types were found to circulate in pigs in the USA, and co-infection of a single pig with two or more PAstV types was frequently observed. A high overall prevalence of 64.0 % (326/509) of PAstV RNA-positive samples was detected, with 97.2 % (317/326) of the PAstV RNA-positive pigs infected with PAstV4. Further genomic sequencing and characterization of the selected isolates revealed low sequence identities (49.2–89.0 %) with known PAstV strains, indicating novel types or genotypes of PAstV2, PAstV4 and PAstV5. Some new features of the genomes of the PAstVs were also discovered. The first complete genome of a PAstV3 isolate was obtained and showed identities of 50.5–55.3 % with mink AstV and the novel human AstVs compared with 38.4–42.7 % with other PAstV types. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that PAstV1, PAstV2 and PAstV3 were more closely related to AstVs from humans and other animals than to each other, indicating past cross-species transmission and the zoonotic potential of these PAstVs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 140-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Noelia Mojsiejczuk ◽  
Carolina Torres ◽  
María Belén Pisano ◽  
Viviana Re ◽  
Rodolfo Héctor Campos ◽  
...  

SlavVaria ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
ИНГРИДА КИСЕЛЮТЕ

Application of The New Economic Criticism. Case of “The Raw Youth” by F. Dostoevsky. First of all Dostoevsky’s novel “The Raw Youth” attracts our attention with its abundance of themes and, as noted, big amount of research (in comparison with other works).It is interesting that in all studies and encyclopedias the main character of this novel, Arkady Dolgorukij, is said that his main idea is “to become a Rothschild.” The idea of the main character becomes a key component in understanding his actions and his main attribution. However, the idea, which is vaguely explained by the character himself at the very beginning of the work is lost not only in the further narration, but also in the generally accepted characterization of the protagonist.The article mainly analyzes the metaphorical idea of the main character of the novel “The Raw Youth” “to become a Rothschild”, and attempts to find out and show why in the history of literature the idea of the protagonist in Dostoevsky’s novel “to become a Rothschild” can be considered as a hypertextual element of entire Dostoevsky’s poetics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.


Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Thelle

The article approaches mobility through a cultural history of urban conflict. Using a case of “The Copenhagen Trouble,“ a series of riots in the Danish capital around 1900, a space of subversive mobilities is delineated. These turn-of-the-century riots points to a new pattern of mobile gathering, the swarm; to a new aspect of public action, the staging; and to new ways of configuring public space. These different components indicate an urban assemblage of subversion, and a new characterization of the “throwntogetherness“ of the modern public.


Author(s):  
John Kerrigan

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.


Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the failure of human rights to address statelessness is well known. Less commented upon is how important literature was to her thought. This chapter shows how Arendt’s 1940s essays on Kafka connect the history of the novel to shifting definitions of legal and political sovereignty. Arendt reads The Castle as a blueprint for a political theory that is also a theory of fiction: in the novel K, the unwanted stranger, demolishes the fiction of the rights of man, and with it, the fantasy of assimilation. In a parallel move, Kafka also refuses to assimilate his character into the conventions of fiction. Arendt’s reading changes the terms for how we might approach the literature of exile and of human rights.


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